It must be the goal of every pharmacovigilance system to make the capture of accurate and comprehensive ADR data as efficient as possible. Recently, schemes have made it easier for patients to report ADRs using social media but the FDA may be taking things a step further.
The FDA has started investigating a different approach to identifying previously unknown ADRs – looking for patterns in massive amounts of internet search data.
Back in 2013, a Google researcher co-authored a paper on using search query data to identify ADRs. Microsoft researchers say they have also been working informally with the agency for several years on detecting drug side effects.
The paper was published in the Journal of Medical Internet and showed that search data could help find previously undiscovered drug reactions. The researchers analysed 176 million Yahoo queries made in 2010.
The FDA gets more than a million reports of adverse drug reactions a year. Although the agency has tried to make the data easier to access, critics say the system probably misses many adverse events and can be slow to detect safety problems.
It may seem counter-intuitive to introduce a mechanism to gather even more data, but the key to success is using the right technology to find the hidden patterns within the data.
While serious symptoms that appear shortly after treatment a starts are likely to be identified by the FDA, search data seems more likely to reveal reactions that appear later after the beginning of treatment and so may otherwise risk being overlooked.
Read more [here].
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